


Ain't It Dark Wrapped Up In That Tarp

by mzhlf



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Abuse, F/F, Mentions of Rape, Minor Character Death, Murderers, Romance, Vigilantism, mentions of child abuse, serial killer au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-11-30 04:58:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11456469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mzhlf/pseuds/mzhlf
Summary: General Danvers Week 2 - Day Six - Crime AUAlex, a medical examiner, catches a stranger's eye as rumors of a serial killer in National City spread among its populace.





	1. The Stranger

**Author's Note:**

> I had initially envisioned this as a multi-chapter rom-com, but this first one turned out a wee bit darker than I thought. Also, very dialogue heavy.
> 
> Content warning for violence and abuse. Also, please hit the back button if you happen to like Mon-El.
> 
> The title was taken from Dixie Chicks - Goodbye Earl.

A harried-looking housewife herded her three kids into the back of an expensive SUV and buckled them in while her balding, middle-aged husband tapped his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. Their youngest kicked up a fuss, piercing the quiet morning with his shrill whines, until the slamming of a car door trapped the noise inside the enclosed space of the vehicle.

Sunday service had started five minutes ago. They were running late. Of all the families that lived in these two symmetrical rows of neatly spaced three-story houses, they were the last ones who hadn’t already left for church.

They pulled out of the driveway in a rush, unaware of the stranger standing behind the curtains in a bedroom across the street. Unaware that someone was watching them as they sped out of sight.

They thought nothing of the shiny black sports car still parked in front of that house. As far as they knew, the rich university student who lived there had never gotten up early a single day in his life, and his girlfriend rarely went out without him.

They didn’t see the front doors open several minutes later. They would never be able to distinguish the stranger who walked down the driveway from his buddies from the university who would oftentimes spend the night.

They had no reason to suspect that the young man they sometimes saw in passing had breathed his last while they slept, or that someone had stood by his bedside and carefully closed his eyes.

No one was there to see the stranger leave. No one was there who would be able to describe the fit of her skinny jeans, or her rubber-soled shoes, or the black gloves that stuck out from the pockets of her leather jacket.

No one that is, except for a handful of cameras hidden around the house, unknown to its recently deceased owner, unknown to the multitudes of fraternity boys and sorority girls that had spent time there with him.

Unknown, even, to his killer.

* * *

Dr. Susan Vasquez leaned over her coworker’s shoulder and peered down at the slab. “Well?” she asked.

“It’s pretty much exactly what it looks like,” Alex reported her analysis. “Blunt force trauma to the side of the head caused a brain hemorrhage. Lead pipe, judging by the fragments in his skull.”

Vasquez winced in sympathy as she scanned over the autopsy report. “That doesn’t seem like a fun way to go.”

“Yeah, I don’t think many of the people we see were having a particularly good day.”

Vasquez peered thoughtfully at his face as Alex was stitching him up. “You know? From this angle, he kinda looks like Russell Crowe.”

Alex looked up briefly from her current task and smiled knowingly. They’d been friends for years, but generally speaking, Vasquez only got this chatty when she was in a particularly good mood.

“Isn’t it weird how their faces look sometimes?” Vasquez mused, and, at Alex’s questioning look, went on to clarify. “Like, you know how we sometimes see grimaces on people who die peacefully of old age, surrounded by family?”

“Ah,” Alex nodded, catching onto Vasquez’s train of thought and pausing in her motions to really look at the guy she'd just autopsied. Despite the panic he must have felt in his last moments, he looked oddly serene.

She couldn’t really see any Russell Crowe resemblance... though he might have passed for Vladimir Putin’s cheerful younger cousin.

“I think it has less to do with how they’re feeling when they die and more to do with how long it takes for them to get here.” Alex gave Vasquez a droll look. “Rigor mortis doesn’t look good on anyone.”

Vasquez hummed in consensus. “Plus,” she added morbidly, “even if you die in horrific agony, you might look peaceful as a sleeping baby, depending on what your body decides to shut off first.”

“Right,” Alex said quietly, and let the conversation lapse.

* * *

“You know…” Vasquez said over lunch, “ _Jess_ showed me this interesting blog post over the weekend,” she mentioned her girlfriend oh-so-innocently.

Alex suspected that that was the source of her good mood. Her fellow ME had been extraordinarily talkative all morning, and while Alex almost always found their conversations enjoyable, the start of a headache throbbed behind her eyes, undoubtedly the result of a restless weekend.

But - oh no. That blog post that had been going around. Alex made a face at Vasquez that was at once imploring and accusatory. “Please tell me you haven’t bought into that whole conspiracy theory.”

Vasquez shrugged, “There’s been some freak incidents lately. Especially among people in low-risk groups.”

“Low risk doesn’t mean no risk,” Alex pointed out. “It just means that if something happens, someone’s gonna sensationalize it for clickbait.”

“So I’m a schmuck.” Vasquez shrugged good-naturedly. “I like a good superhero story, and most superheroes are vigilantes. Which makes a vigilante serial-killer kind of a… scarier version of Batman. Makes for fun, snuggly bedtime reading.” Yep, and there it was again. That subtle reference.

Something Alex had come to realize about Susan Vasquez was that she fancied herself a bit of a badass despite being a romantic at heart. The result of this particular mixture was that Vasquez always required a bit of prompting to start talking about her love life, even if she was absolutely bursting at the seams to spill the beans.

“You’ve been in an awfully good mood,” Alex teased.

“Mm. Have I?” came the coy response.

“You had a good time trying out that restaurant I take it?” Alex finally prompted, and smiled as Vasquez's little smile widened into an enthusiastic grin.

“Oh Danvers, it was _amazing_ ,” Vasquez gushed. “Their ceviche was absolutely phenomenal, and they seated us outside where we could watch the sunset. The chef himself came out to give Jess a free birthday dessert.”

“Not as overpriced and overrated as you’d feared then?”

Vasquez nodded decisively. “And the food wasn’t even the best part of the night.”

Alex raised her eyebrows saucily, but Vasquez - who was no prude - completely missed the insinuation, because she’d already drifted off into her own little memory world. “You ever have one of those conversations where you feel like someone just _gets_ you?”

Alex’s expression softened.

“Like they don’t expect you to shit rainbows, but you also don’t feel like you have to always justify yourself to them. They just know where you’re coming from, because they understand the things that matter to you. You know what I mean?”

Alex didn’t think about it for very long at all. “Honestly? No. But I’m very happy for you.”

Vasquez pursed her lips, fixing Alex with a somewhat critical look. “Whatever happened to that blonde you were seeing? Tamlyn?”

“We didn’t really have any similar interests,” Alex replied blandly.

“No... wait. Yeah, I remember that conversation. That was like a year ago, wasn’t it?” Vasquez searched her memory. “Maybe I’m thinking of Erica?”

Alex wrinkled her nose. “Constantly talked shit about people, especially if she thought they were ugly.”

“Raquel?” Vasquez tried again.

This time, Alex actually grimaced. “Looked through my e-mails and text messages whenever she got paranoid. _And_ cheated on me.”

Vasquez winced. “Geez, Danvers. You sure have a talent for finding the charming ones. One of these days, we’re gonna need to find you a real girlfriend.”

“I’m perfectly happy on my own,” Alex deflected. “Honestly, I’m not even looking.”

 _Happy_ might be a bit of a stretch, she amended privately, but at the very least, there was no one in her life to make her _un-_ happy. Her lack of a significant other didn’t feel like a void that she was driven to fill. It was far better to be single, after all, than to have to allocate a portion of her free time to someone whose company she didn’t particularly enjoy.

It was far better to be single than a great number of things.

 _A full fifty percent of all female homicide victims are killed by a current or previous sexual romantic partner_ , her Criminology professor at the university once said. _For men, that percentage is much lower._

Which meant that the female partner of a male victim was under far less suspicion than the male partner of a female victim.

“Danvers?” Vasquez was looking at her expectantly.

Alex blinked. “Hmm?”

Vasquez tilted her head quizzically. Alex wasn’t usually one to zone out mid-conversation. “I asked you what you did over the weekend.”

“Oh! Uh,” Alex scrambled to remember what she did on Saturday, and rattled off all the items that came to mind. “Went to that kickboxing class. Took a hike. Binged through a season of Grey’s Anatomy. Actually spoke with Kara on the phone more than five minutes for once, since Mike wasn’t around to guilt-trip her.”

Vasquez raised her eyebrows. “I bet. With what you told me, I'm surprised he let her attend her friend’s wedding at all.”

Alex smiled sardonically. “Oh, Mike’s the best guy in the world when he wants to be. He’ll let her hang out with friends who are women when he wants to prove he’s sorry. I’m just the exception because he knows I don’t like him.”

Vasquez shook her head. “On second thought, I don’t blame you at all for wanting to stay single.”

* * *

In hindsight, maybe having the baked ziti special at the cafeteria for lunch wasn’t the best idea.

All she had on her agenda was that one autopsy, which only took a little more than three hours. Today of all days, Alex could have used the mental stimulation of a full workload. Instead, she spent the rest of her work hours trying to catching up on paperwork and struggling to stay awake.

After spending all weekend with barely a wink of sleep, exhaustion finally caught up to her.

The moment she made it to her car and closed the door behind her, she slumped down in her seat, actually contemplating whether she wanted to drive home immediately or take a nap in the parking garage first.

It wasn’t until her eyes caught on a couple of garbage bags sitting in the backseat through the rearview mirror that she remembered what she needed to do.

She had no reason to take note of the gray sedan with tinted windows sitting a few spaces to her right, nor did she see its tail-lights flash to life just after she turned the corner toward the exit.

* * *

The guy at the goodwill took her donations with a quick word of thanks and threw them into a pile with bags and plastic tubs full of clothes from other donors.

“Would you like to valuate your items for tax purposes?” he asked with the same feigned enthusiasm as someone at a McDonald’s asking if she wanted her sandwich in a combo.

Alex politely declined.

Folded up among the clothes she’d cleaned out of her closet were some black leather gloves, a jacket, and an old pair of black skinny-jeans, all perfectly clean. Also included were a handful of shoeboxes, with a pair of rubber-soled shoes sitting innocuously in one of them.

After she left, he went back to doing inventory. He didn’t watch her as she walked the short distance back to her car. He didn’t remember her at all.

But someone else did.

* * *

By the time she got home, Alex was full of restless energy again.

Ever since yesterday, she’d been fluctuating between two extremes. Hyperactive. Exhausted. Hyperactive. Exhausted.

She just couldn’t shake that sense of overwhelming dread, that crippling fear that she’d made the wrong decision.

She wasn’t afraid of being caught or going to jail. Mike’s parents would almost certainly hire a private examiner for an autopsy. Whoever looked at his body would determine that he died in his sleep from a heart attack - a rare occurrence among people in their twenties, but certainly not unheard of.

The thought that terrified her the most, that kept her heart racing in the dark of her room while sleep eluded her, was what this was going to do to Kara.

Even if she didn’t love him, even if she was only giving him another chance out of a misplaced sense of guilt and obligation, Kara felt responsible for him. This was why she kept on going back, even after losing all that weight, even after smiling less and less.

Microwave dinner in one hand, a glass full of whiskey in the other, Alex sat down on the couch with a sigh.

The TV switched on by itself, and she sighed in annoyance. Sometimes the remote got stuck between the seat cushions.

She set the food and drink down on the coffee table and checked under her butt… but it wasn’t there. She felt around under the cushion in confusion, and when she looked back at the screen, she just about screamed.

While she was occupied with finding the remote, it had changed to a desktop she didn’t recognize. There was a video open on it.

The quality was dark and grainy, taken from a single, high vantage point, but there was no mistaking Mike’s bedroom, or his body on the bed. Alex panicked - where could this be coming from? She started to look around, but something cold and hard on the back of her head stopped her short.

The sound of the safety being switched off on a handgun clicked alarmingly close to her ears, and she froze out of sheer instinct.

“I suggest you watch the rest of it, Dr. Danvers,” commanded a cold, female voice close behind her as the muzzle of the gun pressed menacingly into her scalp.

“Okay. Okay,” Alex said, much more calmly than her dry mouth and pounding heart should have reasonably been able to manage, putting her hands up slowly and focusing her eyes back on the screen.

The blocky numbers at the corner read 4:37 A.M., but Alex didn’t really need to look at the timestamp to know what happened next. Mike’s chest rose and fell steadily as he slept. Into the frame a slim shadow drifted, step after deliberate step like Caligari’s somnambulist, staying just out of range of where the moonlight from his window fell across the floor, reaching into its jacket as it stopped by the side of the bed and stood over him.

The attack itself looked almost calm. Alex watched as the monster in this film leaned over, held a gloved hand over his mouth, and plunged the syringe into his arm. His whole body twitched, briefly but violently - she honestly didn’t remember him moving that much - but it only took a few seconds for him to stiffen, and then go slack.

The shadow bent in close, examining the needle prick clinically, before pulling out another syringe and administering the second and fatal shot. The video then began to fast forward. Night brightened into dawn. The darkly-clad figure sped through the frames, using a intimate knowledge of medicine to disguise the puncture wound and position his limbs accordingly.

And of course, since it didn’t know anything about any hidden cameras, it looked almost directly into the lens as it turned to leave. The recording paused on a clear shot of its face.

 _Alex’s_ face.

So much for getting away with it.

Was the woman holding the gun his mother, perhaps? If everything Alex knew about her through digging into Mike’s history was true, then this could only end in her death.

Or was she, perhaps, a stalker? Alex supposed Mike had been handsome, in that hackneyed teen romance sort of way. He had a charming smile and an objectively fantastic sense of humor. That one of the hundreds of women he had bedded would fixate on him to an unhealthy extent is not entirely unfathomable. This scenario was also unlikely to work out in Alex’s favor - or Kara’s, for that matter.

She could be a policewoman, here to arrest her. But this whole situation, of scaring the bejeezus out of her and then forcing her to watch herself commit the deed on video, was so drastically different from anything she knew about police procedure that it seemed highly unlikely.

She could be a bodyguard, though Kara had never mentioned anything about that. Did powerful politicians who weren’t the President actually hire bodyguards for their children?

All things considered, Alex’s chances of making it out of this did not look promising.

“You will explain your actions,” the voice commanded, interrupting her train of thought.

And as terrified as she was, as much as she wanted to see Kara again and help her move on from Mike, as much as she wanted to meet a woman someday who was every bit as good for her as Jess was for Vasquez, whom she would love and understand and support… Alex Danvers refused to die begging like a dog.

So she drew upon nerves of steel, raised her chin high, and lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I think the video pretty much explains itself, don’t you?”

“Then you freely admit to murdering a young man in cold blood,” the voice intoned emotionlessly.

“You have conclusive evidence, don’t you?” Alex pointed out. “What happened happened, whether I admit to it or not.”

The decider of her fate made a faint, huffing noise through her nose. Was she actually _amused_ by this? So, not the mother then, and probably not the stalker.

“You are very brave,” she murmured, and there was… actually a hint of admiration in her voice? Alex honestly had no idea what was going on anymore. “But I’m afraid boldness alone will not spare you from my judgment. Why did you kill Michael Matthews?”

Alex sighed, bowing her head in resignation. Whether it was one press of the trigger, or one click of a mouse on an email to a law enforcement agency, this stranger held her life unwaveringly in her hands.

What did she have to lose?

“My sister Kara,” she started, and felt the woman behind her adjust her grip on her gun.

“The blonde,” the woman supplied, and Alex nodded, wondering how long those cameras had been there. If she’d borne witness to Kara’s relationship with Mike, it might make her explanation easier.

“She’d lost her parents in a car crash when she was a teenager. They were arguing, didn’t see the semi coming and died on impact. They were on a road trip, out in the middle of nowhere. The ambulance took almost an hour to get to them. My sister sat in the backseat, conscious the entire time.”

Alex heard a slightly sharper intake of breath, but the implication of it, the increased probability that she might just make it through this, hardly even registered.

“I hated her when we first met,” Alex remembered with more than a bit of regret. “I didn’t understand how she could be so cheerful after what happened. Figured it was either vapidness, or a facade. But it was neither. Kara is the strongest, bravest person I know.” She found herself, as always, speaking about her sister with pride. It was nothing short of amazing, the way she’d lost her whole world in one afternoon and still opened her heart to people.

“Go on.”

“She’s always helped others whenever she could, even at her own expense. Guilt has always been her Achilles’ heel.” Alex recalled, remembering the kids from her first week of school that swindled her out of her lunch money, and how Eliza reprimanded her for not being there to stop it. “People took advantage, and I couldn’t always protect her.”

“People like Mike Matthews,” the woman jumped to the next logical step, undoubtedly based on the things she’d seen. Despite holding a gun to Alex’s head, her desire to understand Alex’s motives seemed genuine. Alex nodded.

“He didn’t used to be violent. I actually liked him at first,” Alex twisted her mouth in distaste. “It started with little things that seemed innocuous, and then got worse. She’d ask him not to do something and he’d do it anyway. Followed her to class. Picked fights with Dad. Assaulted this other kid who liked her - actually beat him black and blue.” Alex remembered that day vividly, Kara’s terrified voice over the phone, the way she cried like she used to after one of her nightmares. She’d tried to stop him that day, but he was too strong.

The kid had to be hospitalized, but Mike didn’t spend a single night in jail. Alex clenched her fist at the memory. She should have acted then.

So lost was she in recollection that she didn’t even feel the gun waver at the back of her head, didn’t even hear the angry-sounding exhale from the woman behind her.

“She broke up with him a few times. But he always persisted, and she always caved,” Alex shook her head, feeling that same old helplessness seep into her bones, filling her with useless rage. “We had so many fights over it, because she would always defend him. He had a rough childhood. Parents hit him, mom cheated on his dad. And he’d go through this whole…” Alex clenches her teeth, “sob routine with her. _You make me a better man_ , he’d say. _It’s only because I love you that I can’t control my emotions around you._

“It got physical, and the police did nothing. Ours wasn’t the first complaint against him, nor was it the worst. Rape charges, dropped. Assault, settled out of court. His parents protected him from everything.

“Kara thought that she could help him, so she made concession after concession. She lost contact with all her male friends. Only talked to me for five minutes at a time. Ate only when he said she could, saw only people he decided she could see.

“I feared for her life. And so I acted.”

“You had no faith in the justice system,” the woman finally spoke again, and her voice was almost soft. “So you took it upon yourself to see justice served. To protect your loved one.”

Alex nodded, tears springing to her eyes at this understanding she never expected to find from a stranger holding her at gunpoint. “Yeah.”

After a beat, the gun was removed from her head. Alex let out a loud breath that turned into a sob. Ungraceful tears wracked her body, not merely of relief, but also as a purging of pent up tension.

She buried her face in her hands and wept openly.

A hand touched her on the shoulder and then gently stroked her hair. “You made the right choice, brave one,” her gentle voice matched that gentle touch. “Thank you for telling me your story.”

Alex nodded, and wiped at her eyes, sniffling.

“You must never tell anyone of this encounter,” the woman continued almost regretfully, and something in her voice made it sound more like a plea than a warning.

“I won’t,” Alex agreed readily. As emotional as she was, she did remember that the woman had a gun.

It wasn’t until she heard the back door close that she realized she was alone again.


	2. The Admirer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Alex receives an unexpected gift, speculates on the identity of its sender, and learns of a worrisome complication to her plans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to my awesome beta-reader, whoeverdares. Thank you for taking the time out from your busy life to help me.

The delivery driver for the florist was tall, British, and not much else. He wore white polos and beige khakis, with a nice-ish face and a nice-ish personality to match. He was courteous, Alex supposed. Always mild, never offensive or engaging. If he were a food, he’d be a lukewarm but perfectly-cooked bowl of oatmeal with no fruit toppings. His name, Alex eventually learned, was Hugo.

Hugo’s subdued nature contrasted starkly with the bold and colorful floral arrangements that accompanied him, and with the murmur of excitement his arrival occasionally generated.

A Hugo sighting by itself wasn’t cause for curiosity. They were few but close, the little handful of people who worked in the morgue. They knew when Patrick the transporter’s wife was due to give birth. They received sporadic updates via word of mouth about Sally the attendant’s bedridden father.

Nine times out of ten, they knew exactly why Hugo was there. They knew, before looking at the bouquet itself, whether it was a joyous occasion or a sad one. More often than not, they located its recipient for him before he even said their name. Between holidays, birthdays, and major life events, the initial surprise of seeing him rarely lasted more than a few seconds.

Then, there were the times they had no clue. And that’s when it got exciting.

Their forensic technician, Winn, had once compared it to finding a mythical Pokemon. Aside from free food, nothing turned heads in the office more quickly than an unexpected flower delivery, because those generally signified the kind of personal drama which more often than not made for excellent gossip fodder.

Like their pathologist Dr. Lane’s gardenias, after a particularly awkward Thanksgiving dinner, in which her very conservative dad and her very liberal fiance nearly got into a fistfight over politics.

Or Winn’s potted mini-orchid, after a one-time hookup from his old D&D group gave him gonorrhea.

Or Alex’s three dozen roses, over three consecutive days, after her ex-girlfriend’s mother-in-law came out of the closet. _Fell_ out, to be more precise, in nothing but a pair of fluffy handcuffs, strapped comfortably into an expensive seven-inch something that _definitely_ belonged to Alex, which Alex would never be able to use again.

So, when their next birthday wasn’t in another month, and Richard’s baby wasn’t due for another three, and Hugo’s distinctive accent rang through the quiet hallway -

“Delivery for Dr. Danvers?”

\- conversation stopped. The tip of a pen paused mid-sentence against paper. A chair in a nearby office rolled deliberately closer to the door, as he held a single, red long-stemmed rose out to a somewhat frazzled-looking Alex.

“Hugo? Uh...” she stuttered a little, certain there’s been some kind of a mistake. “Are you sure that’s for me?”

Hugo checked the name on the slip and held it up so she could see it. “It’s for a Dr. Alexandra Danvers at this address.”

Alex frowned in befuddlement but accepted it with a murmur of thanks. Hugo nodded, waved, and walked away. She stood there, watching his retreating back for a moment as the plastic sleeve crinkled beneath her fingers.

“You been holding out on me, Danvers?” Vasquez accused, poking her head out from her office, and Alex quickly shook her head, feeling every bit as curious as Vasquez looked.

At least with Raquel, she’d expected a grand gesture of apology. It wasn’t the first time Alex had received personal drama flowers from that particular ex-girlfriend either. No matter what she was feeling, she had a way of expressing it dramatically. Her anger was vindictive, and her apologies, expensive.

After Alex broke up with her for good, she’d hoped to have seen her last personal drama flower. The only good thing about them - or so she thought - was that she at least knew when to expect them.

But this? This just came out of nowhere.

Her eyes caught on the little note tied to the stem. She recognized the florist’s neat, professional script - someone must have dictated a message to her over the phone.

 _Dr. Danvers,_ it said, _Consider this a thank you for our dinner conversation last night... and an apology for my abruptness. The morning is cold, but I burn sweetly with the promise of our fates intertwined._

Alex huffed out a faintly amused chuckle. _The promise of our fates intertwined._ Who said things like that anymore? Vasquez would make a show of rolling her eyes but secretly think it’s sweet. Lucy would just call it extra.

And Alex... Alex couldn’t deny being just a tiny bit charmed. It was comically antiquated, but…strangely endearing. Though she wasn’t entirely sure who it was from.

 _Thank you for dinner._ Who did she have dinner with? _What_ did she have for dinner?

Oh, right. Microwaved chicken parmesan on the coffee table, a glass of wine beside it.

What happened next?

Her TV screen flickered. Cold horror gripped her lungs. Cold metal pressed against the back of her head. A cold voice by her ear, so close and so emotionless, that it raised the hairs on her neck - _I suggest you watch the rest of it, Dr. Danvers_.

Alex dropped the flower as if it had suddenly grown fangs.

Vasquez’s curious look shifted into one of concern. “Not someone you wanted to hear from?”

“Oh! No,” Alex quickly fibbed, because talking about what happened last night would mean talking about what happened on Sunday.

And _that_ was a secret Alex would carry with her to the grave.

“It’s just…” she bent down to pick the items up, blurting out the first person she thought of who fit that criteria, “it’s my - it’s just my mom. Nothing to worry about.”

Vasquez’s disbelief was written all over her face. “Your _mom_ sent you a flower?”

“No! No,” Alex hurried to correct once she realized just how ridiculous that sounded. “I... had a dinner date, that, went poorly, because - because she wouldn’t stop asking my questions about my past. Which uh, includes my mom, for obvious reasons.” She fidgeted with the card paper. “We touched on some, some sensitive topics. You know, family issues. I might have cried a little. Or... a lot.”

Vasquez’s eyes were as wide as saucers for a good few seconds. And then she chuckled. “No shit. And I’m guessing she wants a repeat performance?”

Alex heard a faint snort from the lab and quiet snickering from Dr. Lane’s office. She could play this entire conversation off as embarrassment. And if Vasquez’s droll expression was any indication, it was already working.

Alex shrugged, cheeks prickling with her own deception. The note felt sweaty between her fingers. “I guess?”

“Aaaand are you gonna take her up on it?” Winn pressed in a falsetto voice from down the hallway. Vasquez raised her eyebrows, anticipating the answer herself, and pouted a little when Alex shook her head vehemently.

“Y’know? I’m sure she’s lovely, but I just wasn’t feeling it.”

“Sounded like you had an interesting conversation at least?” Vasquez pressed just a tiny bit more.

Alex shrugged. “She just, she struck me as,” she gesticulated a little, “as someone with trust issues. Like, even though she asked me a bunch of personal questions, she never really let me see her. You know, how some people just have a hard time opening up?”

Vasquez pursed her lips sympathetically. “Mm. Pity.”

“Yeah,” Alex agreed, wiggling her toes in her shoes.

Curiosity satisfied, and mild amusement at Alex’s expense enjoyed, everyone within hearing range resumed their previous tasks, leaving her once more to the privacy of her thoughts.

* * *

Alex closed her office door behind her and dropped into her chair with a weary sigh.

After the stranger left, she curled up on the couch and cried for awhile longer, and then… nothing. Her memories of last night ended there.

It must have been barely eight o’clock when she fell asleep. And by the time the sunlight streaming through the curtains irritated her puffy eyelids into cracking open, she was already fifteen minutes late to work. After two consecutive all-nighters, her body had finally decided that it was getting thirteen hours of uninterrupted rest whether Alex wanted it or not.

It took even longer for her brain to wake up.

She didn’t remember climbing out of the couch. Or brushing her teeth, or changing out of yesterday’s clothes, or driving to work.

Her agenda had been full today, with two autopsies in the morning and one right after lunch, allowing very little time to process in between. She remembered the specifics of each case, each organ abnormality and each cause of death. She trusted in her fluency and knowledge, knew that each piece of data was correct. Even then, she couldn't quite remember actually arriving at those conclusions.

Alex had preferred it that way. She’d wanted to avoid doing any of her processing here, where someone might see her. Some miniscule tick or gesture might broadcast her sins to anyone who might be looking.

Now that she was by herself, enclosed by walls, Alex remembered that thin, drifting shadow from the video.

She remembered the straightness of its torso, its slow progression toward the bed. The dim frames of the recording played more vividly in her mind than the memory of standing in that bedroom.

She couldn’t remember depressing the plunger on the syringe. But she did remember moonlight falling across both their faces, hers and Mike’s. She remembered how the fight in his eyes drained into horror and recognition. She remembered feeling determined. She remembered feeling afraid.

How had she looked to him with grim determination rushing through her veins? Did she appear even a tiny bit as afraid as she felt, or did she seem as calm as she did in the recording? Could he see a part of her crawl into his deathbed next to him as the knowledge of how it felt to take a human life was etched permanently into her heart?

Even if Alex would have done it again, it seemed incomprehensible that the weight of that knowledge did not distort every line of her body.

The rattle of his last breath coiled in her skull like a basilisk, threatening to petrify her if she peered too closely at that memory and the feelings associated with it.

Alex would have gladly lived out the rest of her life without ever facing it. But this flower delivery changed some things.

There was now a threat to her existence. Someone who could permanently ruin her relationship with Kara and condemn her to a lifetime in jail was once again making her presence known.

 _You must never tell anyone of this encounter_ , she’d said, and a foolish part of Alex had heard an unspoken blessing. At the time, it seemed like an agreement: so long as she didn’t tell the police about anyone breaking into her home, she herself would remain unharassed.

This note wrested that optimism out of her hands. She could see now, that the words unspoken were no blessing at all.

 _You must never tell anyone of this encounter,_ the stranger might as well have said, _I’d hate to have to turn you in before I’ve had my fun with you._

The rose was feather-soft beneath Alex’s thumb, but all she felt was the hard plastic of a syringe plunger giving way as she pulled out a petal.

Who was she?

More relevantly, what was her relationship to Mike?

Alex felt less certain than she did last night that the stranger wasn’t actually his mother or an ex-lover.

_I burn sweetly with the promise of our fates intertwined._

It certainly seemed poetic and romantic at first glance. Alex imagined hearing it over the phone in the stranger’s voice, and stomped down on the small, lonely, irrational part of her that burned in sympathy.

Alex tore off another petal.

She was an idiot if she saw it for anything other than it was: a threat. Perhaps even a taunt. Behind the pretty language loomed the real message: _you haven’t seen the last of me._

Alex stroked a third between her thumb and forefinger, ignorant of the moment it came loose in her hand.

Would Mike’s mother risk allowing his killer to escape, if it meant she could psychologically torment her before ending her misery? Was she twisted enough to flirt with Alex, having seen the murder with her own eyes? Was she cruel enough to stroke Alex’s cheek and instill a false sense of security by feigning approval?

 _You had no faith in the justice system,_ the intruder had said to her. _So you took it upon yourself to see justice served. To protect your loved one._

_You made the right choice._

Alex plucked out a fourth, no longer a deliberate action, but merely meditative.

While she couldn’t rule Rita Matthews out as a possibility, a gut feeling told her that those words were sincere.

She could still be an ex-lover.

It wouldn’t necessarily mean that she harbored any lingering fondness. Perhaps he betrayed her. Perhaps, by destroying the object of her rage, Alex had thwarted an elaborate revenge plot. Men certainly didn’t have a monopoly on post-break-up murders.

...which, judging by the note, would make Alex the new object of her fixation. She may very well be at the mercy of someone who had lost all ability to reason.

The stranger from last night did not _seem_ unreasonable. Alex may have fibbed about a dinner date to appease her coworkers, but the sad truth of it was, she’d been a more attentive listener than some of Alex’s actual dinner dates.

Then again, appearances could deceive. Ed Gein seemed perfectly friendly to some people, and he had a belt stitched together from human nipples. Alex wanted her nipples to stay exactly where they were.

No, no. Alex was going about this all wrong.

She was overthinking it.

In her stress-fueled paranoia, she’d forgotten the most basic principle of science. When faced with multiple hypotheses, always bet on the one with the fewest assumptions.

Did such a hypothesis even exist?

It seemed superbly unlikely that Rita Matthews would play games when she had the perfect chance to kill her or submit the evidence to police.

The unhinged ex-lover theory seemed only slightly more promising: Mike had enough of them that a few were bound to be a little unhinged, and whoever it was that owned the cameras must have once had access to his house. Other than that, it was all just paranoid fiction.

Alex could take all her words at face value, but trusting a home invader who’d held her at gunpoint required a fairly massive leap of faith.

Still… to cover all her bases, Alex tested the distance.

The stranger was more concerned with Alex’s motives than with the murder itself. She approved of Alex’s actions. She left without hurting her. And if the lack of armed officers swarming into the morgue was any indication, she had not informed the police.

 _Boldness alone will not spare you from my judgment_ , she’d said, as if passing judgment on Alex was in her right.

Was that what she broke into her home to do? Pass judgment?

What would have become of Mike, had Alex not chosen that night to kill him? What would have become of Alex, had her story not fallen on sympathetic ears the following night?

A knock on her door interrupted her musings.

She found herself clutching a bare stem, with dark red petals strewn across her desk. Some of the color had bled, staining the skin underneath her fingernails.

Alex quickly swept the disassembled rose into the trashcan. The note, she tucked into her pocket. Her fingers, she hid behind a fist.

“Yeah, what’s up?” Alex called, and pasted a smile on her face when Vasquez opened the door and stuck her head in.

“We still on for dinner?”

Alex looked at the clock and swore under her breath. It was already almost six PM. “Oh! Just, let me finish up this one thing and I’ll meet you guys there.”

“Great, see you in a bit.”

* * *

Alex held her hands under a running faucet and picked out the red from under her nails. The ice cold water seeped into her knuckles and turned her skin pink. Harsh white overhead lights lengthened the shadows beneath her cheekbones and paled her lips. Her reflection stared gauntly at her.

By the time she reached for a paper towel, her fingers were numb.

* * *

Her phone buzzed. Alex’s eyes flickered down for a split second.

It was Kara.

_Have you heard from Mike?_

Alex responded quickly in the negative, pressed the sleep button on her phone, and shoved it into her pocket.

“It’s not charity if you work for her,” Vasquez was saying around a mouthful of pita as Alex refocused her attention on her dinner companions. “A bonus is just a bonus.”

“Right,” Jess deadpanned, “and I should think nothing of the fact that it’s almost equal to my yearly paycheck and conveniently covers my mother’s medical expenses.”

Vasquez smiled in an attempt to reassure her. “You know? Coincidences happen. And even if it isn’t, I don’t think she’d want you to worry about it.”

Alex nodded in agreement. Plus, she added mentally, the kind of money that changed the lives of ordinary people, probably felt like pennies to Jess’s boss.

Letting someone suffer would have been morally indefensible, especially when she had the means to prevent it.

Jess wrinkled her nose. “I know. I just wish there was some way to repay her.”

“That right there?” Alex pointed a chicken kebab in her direction. “Textbook example of worrying about it,” Vasquez shot her an appreciative look and Jess chuckled good-naturedly.

Vasquez chose this moment to deliberately change the subject, lowering her voice to avoid being overhead. “Wanna hear something kind of spooky?”

The diversion seemed to work - Jess leaned forward curiously.

Vasquez looked at Alex. “Your guy from yesterday morning. Remember him?” She rolled her eyes at Alex’s puzzled frown. “Russell Crowe?” she prompted.

“Oh!” Guy with the peaceful-looking face. “Lead pipe?” Alex double-checked.

Vasquez nodded. “Keep this on the down low, but I ran into Reynolds last night at the bar. He was in really bad shape.”

Reynolds… oh, right. He was one of the homicide detectives. Alex saw him yesterday morning at the crime scene. Wow, she was still feeling out of it. Hopefully another decent night of sleep would remedy her lack of focus.

“What happened?” Jess asked, frowning.

Alex’s phone vibrated again. This time, she ignored it, shooting Kara a mental apology - she just didn’t have the nerve to deal with Mike-related worries when she wasn’t alone. Instead, she focused on Vasquez.

“Apparently,” Vasquez started, “he was a state-employed social worker who counselled juvies. Worked with the NCPD on more than one occasion. Reynolds knew him by name.”

Alex frowned in sympathy - she’d never had to examine anyone she knew, and she hoped she never would. She supposed she’d be upset too, if she were Reynolds. But the story wasn’t quite finished.

“They found some suspicious pictures on his phone and searched his house.” Vasquez paused, her lips turning downward in disgust. “And his desktop was full - and I mean _full_. Of child pornography. And some of it? Was homemade.”

Alex’s stomach turned nauseously and her hand went to her mouth. “Oh my god.”

“And the worst part is? Two of the children they IDed are from cases he handled. One of them told his mom and she tried to report it, but our social worker had the kid on file as a pathological liar. It was a juvie's word against this white-collar guy they personally knew. Guess who the officer believed.”

Alex didn’t need to guess - she’d seen their complacency first hand, with regards to Mike. “They didn’t even look into it,” she stated.

“Nope,” Vasquez confirmed.

“Well, good riddance at least,” Jess muttered. “I hope they fire whoever ignored the complaint.”

They’d more than likely go without so much as a reprimand. This, Alex also knew.

“Now, I’m not a huge believer in karma or all that new age shit,” Vasquez said, giving Jess a pointed look, “but to me? This seems pretty fucking karmic.”

Jess looked thoughtful. “Are you thinking it might be _him_?”

“It fits his pattern perfectly,” Vasquez speculated. “Though Danvers here doesn’t believe he exists.”

Alex shrugged with one shoulder, eyes flickering toward the tablecloth. “Coincidences happen,” she echoed Vasquez’s words from a few minutes ago. “Some people die unexpectedly, and some of them happen to be terrible. It doesn’t mean that some secret Batman figure’s watching from a control room, passing judgment -”

Her thought processes stuttered to a stop.

_I’m afraid boldness alone will not spare you from my judgment._

It was too far-fetched. Too unlikely. A one-time murderer with shitty enough luck to have stolen a serial killer’s target sounded more like the premise of a horrible sitcom than anything that happened in real life.

“...uh, passing judgment on all the evildoers,” Alex finished, what was initially meant to be a droll comment ending lamely in an anemic mumble.

Her dinner companions didn’t seem to notice her abrupt shift in mood. “You’re probably right,” Jess admitted. “And you know? Part of it is just National City creating its own urban legend. But part of it is also wishful thinking.”

“If everyone took justice into their own hands, wouldn’t the world dissolve into chaos?” Alex asked almost offhandedly, as if she wasn’t haunted by the selfsame question.

Vasquez thought about it for a moment. “I mean, probably. Vigilantism is terrifying.”

Alex’s heart sank just a little.

“But the system is also rigged,” she continued. “People get away with doing all kinds of shit if they have a bit of power, and I think that’s fucked up.”

Her phone vibrated again. And again. It wasn’t a text message this time. Alex frowned with worry: her sister rarely called these days unless it was an emergency.

She checked the caller ID, and sure enough. “Sorry,” she quickly excused herself, “Kara’s calling. I have to take this.”

Identical expressions of sympathetic concern followed her out the door.

* * *

“What’s up?” Alex greeted as the backdoor to the Mediterranean restaurant swung shut behind her.

“ _Alex,_ ” Her sister’s voice sounded thin and frenetic. “ _Sorry to keep on bugging you, but, uh, I haven’t heard from Mike in two days._ ” Kara let out a shaky breath, and Alex pushed down a pang of guilt.

“ _He just - he gets like this sometimes when he’s mad, though he seemed okay with me going on this roadtrip,_ ” Kara rambled, “ _though sometimes he says one thing and means something else... which I should have expected, and I’d gladly deal with all of that tomorrow night, if it weren’t for the fact that my car broke down._ ”

“Wait,” Alex closed her eyes, bringing a hand to her forehead. “Slow down.”

“ _Sorry._ ”

“It’s okay,” Alex was quick to reassure her. “So, your car broke down? Where are you right now?”

“ _I’m at Tracy’s still. She got me a plane ticket for tonight since it’s being sent to the junkyard._ ”

Alex nearly dropped the phone. “You’re flying back _tonight_?” she repeated, hoping against hope that she’d somehow misheard.

“ _Yeah, someone cancelled their seat last minute -_ ”

 _Shit._ Alex’s mind raced, and she started pacing.

It was warm on Saturday night, and Mike’s bedroom window had been cracked open. The temperature dropped on Sunday and stayed cold throughout the week. She figured it would take a few days before the neighbors were bothered by the smell. And sure enough, it was Tuesday night and the body still hadn’t been found. The housekeeper showed up every Wednesday afternoon, which would have eliminated the possibility of Kara finding the body... if she got in tomorrow night like she’d initially planned.

“ _\- so I don't know what else to do._ ”

Alex brought herself back to the conversation with more than a bit of effort. “Uh, sorry. Did you need a ride from the airport?”

“ _No!_ ” Kara replied hastily, but then amended: “ _Well, maybe. I did leave a couple of voicemails for him, and I’d rather not risk a run-in, especially if he’s already mad at me._ ” She thought about it for a second while Alex held her tongue. “ _I’ll give him an hour or so after I land, and if he doesn’t show up, I might need you to pick me up._ ”

“Of course,” Alex said quietly. “What time should I be there?”

Kara thought about it for a moment. “ _Well, my flight lands at three in the morning… so maybe four-ish? But no earlier than that... okay? Keep an eye on your phone. I’ll text you if I hear from him._ ”

Alex shook her head, thankful that Kara couldn’t see her expression. The degree to which Mike had managed to get her to bend over backwards for him was astounding. “Alright. Yeah. Sure.”

Kara sighed, as if sensing her thoughts. “ _I’m really sorry about this Alex. I love you._ ”

Alex smiled sadly. “Love you too, sis.”

* * *

Alex hardly remembered the rest of the dinner, so lost was she in her thoughts. Vasquez didn’t try to pry it out of her either - just peered understandingly from across the table as she carried on her conversation with Jess.

Interactions with Kara left Alex in a dour mood more often than not these days. Everyone around her had noticed that by now.

This time, it worked to her advantage.

As Alex contemplated her next move, neither of them had reason to suspect that she was rendered mute by anything other than her usual concoction of rage, melancholy and guilt. There would be time for those things later, once she’d prevented her sister from finding the body.

She had to, because the dreams still haunted Kara. They’d decreased in frequency over the years, but never went away completely. Kara couldn’t even talk about it during those first months, just wept into Alex’s shoulder after waking her up with her crying.

After a year or so, the memory came out in mangled pieces. There she sat in the backseat, trapped in the bright summer stillness with the front of her mother’s car warped unrecognizable from the collision. The back of the semi-truck dripped with red inches away from her face. The stench of blood and gutted machinery choked the air out from her lungs. The door was stuck. She couldn’t get out. Her phone had fallen between the front seats and she couldn’t reach it. The road was isolated and empty.

Alex wished that she could hold onto that memory on Kara’s behalf, contain it in her own head so that Kara would never be troubled by it again, even if it meant suffering through her nightmares.

Kara could not find the body. She could not return to a house that smelled of decay and climb the stairs to find him laid out in his room. Alex would rather die than allow that to happen.

Alex could… Alex could call the police. Pretend to be a neighbor, and complain about the smell herself. But then they’d have a recording of her voice on file. And when it didn’t match any of Mike’s actual neighbors, they’d find out who she really was. They’d discover her relationship to Kara, they’d know where she worked. They’d piece together her motive and means.

Kara would realize what Alex had done. Kara would realize that Alex’s plan had relied almost entirely on her absence, that the beginnings of it had taken form right after she’d mentioned going on a road trip by herself. Kara would realize that if it hadn’t been for the trip, Alex wouldn’t have had the opportunity.

No. Turning herself in or getting caught was, if anything, an even worse option than leaving the body for Kara to find. At least then she’d think he died of natural causes.

Alex could sneak back in tonight, dispose of it while everyone’s asleep… but by now, the cloying smell would be clinging to every last surface of his room. If she were going to dump the body at all, she would have needed to do it on Sunday.

She could... try to get someone else to call the police? But involving another person would dramatically increase her risk of getting caught.

Would Vasquez keep her secret, if she entrusted it to her? She was the closest person outside of Kara that Alex had to a friend.

But an urban fiction was harmless, and vigilantism was terrifying. Enjoying fun, snuggly bedtime reading wasn’t the same as signing up for the terrifying reality of handling corpses your friend made illegally and helping them evade the police.

Alex needed to engineer some kind of a delay. Some excuse not to drive Kara home immediately from the airport. And an accident was out of the question.

_BANG!_

A startled cry tore its way out of Alex’s throat as her entire car rattled from the impact.

The kid in a backwards baseball cap who slammed into her front hood pushed himself upright again, and as his friends burst out laughing, Alex squeezed her eyes shut and willed her heart to stop pounding.

“Oh my god Josh, you’re such a dumbass,” a girl admonished.

“Dude, there’s someone in there,” another backwards-baseball-cap kid noticed, still laughing. “You just scared the crap out of them, you freak.”

The original backwards-baseball-cap kid got back on his skateboard and the sound of chatter and plastic wheels against the pavement diminished as the group of four kept on walking without a word of apology.

Alex shook her head - she really needed to get better about this zoning out thing - and checked the time on her phone.

She’d been sitting silently in the dark parking lot for over an hour.

Well. That wasn’t creepy at all.

* * *

A delay. Alex needed a delay, and it had to be long enough. What would cause Kara to land at three AM, but not get home until the late afternoon?

The car could break down. She could get a flat tire.

But none of these things would keep them for long enough, and the more delays she used, the more suspicious Kara would become. Kara wasn’t stupid. Alex needed to think of something good.

What if… instead of taking her straight home, Alex drove to her apartment instead? What if she just… flat out refused to take her home? What if she subjected her to another one of those big sister lectures?

That would immediately put Kara on the defensive - the topic of her relationship with Mike had already driven a rift between them. That horse was dead for so long, all that remained was the grass that grew from it, but Alex would pluck it blade by blade if she could just keep her talking.

Alex hated the thought of disrespecting her agency in such a way. Kara had told her once that she needed her faith, and she was about to betray that, had already betrayed it by killing Mike. But all things considered, a drawn out argument seemed to be the lesser of many evils.

Her decision made, Alex blocked out every source of light from her bedroom, fell onto her mattress, set her alarm for 3:15, and closed her eyes.

At 3:20, she made herself a big jug of coffee and drank it all black.

No sooner had she pulled on her jacket, when Kara’s ringtone chirped in the silence of the night.

Alex answered it in half a ring.

“ _Hey Alex,_ ” Kara sounded breathless and kind of dazed. Conversation, footsteps, and rolling luggage cases filtered into Alex’s ear in the stretch of silence following her greeting.

“ _I might not need a ride from you after all. You’ll never guess who I just ran into._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp. Not sure how I feel about this chapter yet.
> 
> As a forewarning: this might turn into a pretty long story.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and critical feedback are, as always, appreciated. Also, this will wander into some pretty heavy topics. I will try my best to tag things, but please let me know of any that I'm missing.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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